Hewitt's Scarlatti Sonatas

On WCRB's CD of the Week, pianist Angela Hewitt, well-known for Bach, turns to one of that composer's most prolific contemporaries, Italian master Domenico Scarlatti.

Music evolves when composers combine cultural traditions to create a new individual voice. Naples-born Domenico Scarlatti spent much of his life traveling between palaces in Portugal and Spain as a composer and teacher. Having mastered all things Italian baroque (and allegedly, having beat Handel in a keyboard duel), he went on to create an unimaginably vast set of keyboard jewels, each of which creates its own mini-universe of emotion. When Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt set out to select works for her second album of Scarlatti’s solo keyboard works, she found the vast repertoire almost daunting: “Recording a first album of sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti in February of 2015 was such a great experience that, inevitably, I couldn’t stop there. Not with another 540 or so to choose from! It wasn’t easy to select seventeen for this second recording, simply because there are so many wonderful ones…”

Listen to a sampler for the album:

For more information, a track listing, and to purchase this recording, visit ArkivMusic.